Four hours of prosthetics every morning the jowls and the nose and it was very hot so they’re having to attend to it all day and you’re still petrified of so many things such as can I speak properly? Hitchcock never quite lost those East End vowels even though he had the softened California consonants.

They seem much rarer now those auteur films that come out of a director’s imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.

I heard about the project over a year before we began. My American agent said ‘Oh you might want to read ‘In Cold Blood’ because they’re talking about you for Capote but the script’s with Johnny Depp and Sean Penn at the moment.’ So these things take their time to dribble down the food chain.

I studied Hitchcock a little bit at University and knew the famous story about the Birds – that he’d tortured Tippi for a day using real birds. I had no idea that it was a five-day onslaught and that it was the tip of an iceberg that carried on through to another film.

I teach one semester a year and this year I’m just teaching one course during that semester a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.